Cetacean interactions with commercial fishing nets have become both a global conservation issue as well as an economical concern. Not only have some populations been drastically reduced by incidental bycatch, but fishermen have also increasingly complained about an unsustainable loss of captures in certain areas, directly linked to cetacean predation.

Based on the current knowledge of ocean acoustics, we took into account the properties of underwater sound backscattered from air bubbles to analyse their acoustic response to incident sonar waves from the bottlenose dolphin, the harbour porpoise and the orca, three of the most common cetacean species involved in fishing interactions, to study how good a reflector a bubble cloud could be and what the behavioural response of these species would be when insonified-back by their own signals.